


Dead Water

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [12]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: (she's like 9 years old), Alt Power, Endbringer Aftermath, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Kid Taylor Hebert, Self-Destruction, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-23 05:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20003203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: At the end of your known world, who can hear you cry? Amy isn't sure.(AU - all of the Dallons besides Amy die during the Leviathan fight; Taylor is 9 years old.)





	Dead Water

Everyone was dead.

Vicky, Sarah, Dad, Eric, Crystal, Neil – even _Carol_. All dead, smeared like so much dead weight against the fury of a _fucking fish monster_. Even Dean was dead, though she couldn’t gather much in the way of an emotional response to that. Victoria had watched him die apparently, swooped in unexpectedly, probably driven by rage, and had been pulped with him. There’d been no time for a rescue nor a way to ‘save’ them, any of them. They’d all been dead-on-announcement.

She hadn’t known until the _entire fucking fight was over_. It was only when nobody showed up to tell her anything, when she was _left_ at that godforsaken hospital overnight, that it clicked into place.

The rain puddled at her ankles while the streets around her clogged like a churning stream. Amy tilted her head back, let the hood tip back from her forehead, let the rain collect in the pouch she’d provided for it. Was this shock? She wasn’t sure, apparently she’d been non-responsive when they’d finally told her. She’d said nothing for hours, just _stared_ , unable to talk, unwilling to. She didn’t even remember it, but she did remember the screaming she did after the fact, when she hid away in the hospital’s break room, buried her nose into the couch seats, and let everything out.

It was a small blessing they’d let her do that much.

Was the sky grey? Or was it her inability to feel much of anything? Surely, the air should be cold, the rain should be frigid, but it wasn’t – _nothing was_. She pulled her arm out as she continued to walk, palm facing skyward, feeling nothing as the rain tumbled down into it. Her power fired off whenever it touched, offering information about the bacteria, yet she couldn't feel it. No wet, no cold, no warm, no nothing.

What was she even doing? Where was she even going?

 _I want to die_. Amy laughed at the thought, it sounded so hollow. _I can’t even feel guilty about it anymore, not like before – fuck who I was before, it did nothing to fix anything_.

The temptation pricked at the back of her head, the urge to flense her power through one of those bits of bacteria, to engineer something that would rapidly replicate and, say, maybe consume steel. A smile toyed at her lips, her cheeks drawing tight and her eyes clamping shut as she thought about it. It was inane, it was self-destructive, but _what was the point anymore_? What were the rules for, anyway? She’d kept them around to make sure she’d stay with Victoria, that she’d been seen as _good_ , not because she’d actually felt guilt. Carol had taught her that much, right? That she was just a monster-in-waiting, a Nilbog-to-be who was _fucking incapable of empathy_ , so why not prove her right on her death knell?

Why not wipe everything away?

A raindrop slid off of her outstretched index finger, landing soundlessly in the currents below.

She just couldn’t. Why? _Why couldn’t she_? The world felt a little heavier, then, pressed harder into her shoulders, grated a bit harder against her senses. The rain felt cold, her clothes clung tight to her body in ways she found uncomfortable, her body was run through with fatigue, and not to even mention how heavy her head felt. _What am I even doing here?_

She heard the sound before she saw it. Crying, a crinkle from a voice a few pitches too high to be anything but prepubescent. It was loud and shrill, somehow breaking over the steady downpour of rain, broken up by heaving, drunken gasps. It was a painful wail, Amy recognized absently, coming to a pause just before the street broke off into dozens of alleys. The source of the noise was just to her right, past the lip of the building.

She should just go back, really. Amy wasn’t particularly sure where she even was anymore, though she guessed somewhere between Arcadia and the PRT HQ. From the ruins she could at least assume that the area had been a strip of commercial buildings, though one without any one particular theme. A boutique here, a cafe there, even a thoroughly looted jewelry store. She wanted to step away, to pretend she heard nothing, to _knowingly walk away_ , but she still paused, still let the rain puddle on her clothing and let the river beneath her burble and swim down the street.

The crying never lessened, but neither did it grow. It was constant, hitching in tone but never in intensity, always playing back after a moment to gulp and gasp for air. Amy wanted to feel something about it, wanted to feel angry that someone else was suffering, or maybe feel empathy. Yet, there was nothing, no emotion, no _anything_. Just emptiness, a swirling vortex of not-much-in-particular, so many dramatic words used for a feeling that could be thusly summed up as _null_.

She took a step forward, turning her head as she approached. The interior of the alleyway was abruptly green, a tangle of moss and vines and misshapen trees. It actually gave her genuine pause, a lilt of shock making her step stagger and nearly send her to her knees at the sight. In the center of the cluster of green was a prepubescent girl, a tangle of curly black hair pulled back into a messy bun, with a fisherman’s cap fastened firmly to the top of her head. She wore a raincoat with “TAYLOR” embroidered along the collar, plastic rain boots and what looked to be black leggings, resembling a yellow highlighter contrasting with just so much green.

That wasn’t really the _weird_ part, per-se. It was the plants. Tangles of vines, wound together to resemble muscle, drooped from the tree above, a hand rubbing comforting circles around the top of her back. Another vine was caressing her cheek, shaped much the same as the last, and a third and fourth were hugging her painfully tight. The girl, with hands bunched against her eyes, wailed anyway, desperate and unsoothed by the apparent attempt at placating her.

 _The fuck am I supposed to do about this?_ A prepubescent girl, alone, surrounded by soothing vines. Did she trigger? Was that someone else? Was the girl _herself_ a power? Was she about to be Mastered if she walked in there? Was this Borough, or whatever they called the cape from The Elite?

Did she care?

Huh.

Amy stepped into the alleyway, dumping her hands into the soggy confines of her costume’s pockets. The girl’s head jerked up, a cry of concern overwhelming the one of grief as she flinched back. The plants lurched and bulged, erupting towards Amy, though not with the intensity needed to actually hurt her. They tried to constrict around her, drag her away, create distance.

She urged them to wilt and die. They did.

The girl babbled, arms coming up as more plants responded, surging up from the cracks in the ground. Those died too, a push here, a nudge there, it all died. It was eerie just how easy it was, a simple _brush_ , nothing more than that, and the plants decayed, dropping lifelessly at her feet.

“Mo—” the girl, voice so hoarse, called out with words, but caught herself. Her expression swirled, diving into intense grief as she _yet again_ devolved into heaving sobs. The plants moved to soothe her, or at least the ones left over, grasping hands made out of plant fibers brushing at places in such a grotesquely human sort of way, all the subtleties of the gesture replicated with tangled vines and ferns.

She reached out, looped her fingers into the vines, and urged them away. They died, too, leaving the alley smothered in half-decayed browns, the girl still standing so distinct against it, colored by her rubber boots and jacket. She made no attempt to cry out or speak this time, opting to instead just _wail_ , wail so loud that Amy couldn’t help but wince at the sound.

“What are you even doing here.”

The girl didn’t respond.

“ _Listen to me._ ” Anger, _blessed_ anger finally slipped in. She didn’t pretend, gripping the girl by the hem of her rain jacket and _yanking_ her forward. “What. Are. You. Doing. Out. Here?”

“They’re dead!” was the babble she got, loud and broken.

“Who.”

“Mo – mom, _dad_!”

Sparing the crawling green that had since started to return, creeping in on the fringes of her vision, Amy grunted and let go, the girl dropping and crumpling onto her ass. “Get up.”

“Hunh?” _Fucking christ, this kid._

“I said.” She reached for the hem of the girl’s jacket, killing the plant that tried to stop her. She yanked her to her feet, dusting off some of the half-rotten plant matter that’d clumped on one of the buttons. “Get up. We’re going to the big PRT building.”

The girl stared, eyes owl-big and confused. Amy repressed the urge to walk off. “You have powers, I need to go back and... Fuck, I don’t know. Do _something_.”

She only realized that the smaller girl had, for some inexplicable reason, grabbed her hand. A cursory glance over her biology informed her she definitely hadn’t hit puberty yet, was somewhat malnourished, and had one particularly active corona pollentia, with it being big enough to compress the brain around it. “Why are you holding my hand?”

The other girl said nothing. Amy sighed.

“Whatever, fine. Let’s fucking go.”

At the very least, the girl listened this time.


End file.
